Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia

From the first publisher granted access to Stalin’s personal archive, a provocative and insightful portrait of modern Russia—the most compelling since David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb.To most Americans, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. In Inside the Stalin Archives, Jonathan Brent asks, why didn’t this happen? Why are archivists under surveillance and phones still tapped? Why does Stalin, a man responsible for millions of deaths of his own people, remain popular enough to appear on boxes of chocolate sold in Moscow’s airport? Brent draws on fifteen years of unprecedented access to high-level Soviet Archives to answer these questions. He shows us a Russia where, in 1992, used toothbrushes were sold on the sidewalks, while now shops are filled with luxury goods and the streets are jammed with Mercedes. At the book’s crescendo, Brent takes us deep into the dictator’s personal archives to glimpse the dark heart of the new Russia while on the street and in their homes he finds the enduring strength and dignity of the Russian people. Both cultural history and personal memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives is a deeply felt and vivid portrait of Russia’s troubling place in the twenty-first century. 14 black-and-white photographs